Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh: Small-town boy makes guru (part 2 of 20)

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh speaks like a man who has cornered the market on enlightenment.

His soliloquies flow, sometimes for hours -- montages of philosophy and whimsy punctuated by smug pauses and one-liners. The Indian accent adds a gentle hiss, as if Rajneesh were not really sharing wisdom, but simply permitting bits of it to escape.

His presence, tone and delivery are part of a finely crafted performance that attracted thousands of followers to the Shree Rajneesh Ashram in Poona, India, in the 1970s. Insulated from his critics, who rate him somewhere between demonic hypnotist and overblown fakir, Rajneesh remains at center stage on the Central Oregon ranch his followers bought in mid-1981.

His disciples compare him to Buddha, Jesus Christ and Krishna. They call him bhagwan, "the blessed one." The ex-foreman of the ranch calls him Uncle George. The 53-year-old guru just might enjoy that leap from the reverent to the flip. He has a theory about extremes.

"Don't avoid extremes, and don't choose any one extreme," Rajneesh said in "The Fish in the Sea is not Thirsty." "Remain available to both the polarities -- that is the art, the secret of balancing."

However defined, Rajneesh's art has served him well. Relatives and friends in Indian said that, like any successful showman, Rajneesh combined a good memory, quick reactions and sheer drive to hog the spotlight. His story is a classic with a mystical twist -- small-town boy makes guru.

"He was a brilliant student, an intelligent student," said Shikharchand Jain, also known by the sannyasin name of Anand Sidharth. "He read all of the books in the library. He was fond of learning."

They were glowing words for the boy who would pursue a career as an itinerant lecturer, peddling philosophical goods on road trips across India. That "brilliant student" would alter test his followers in "meditations" as serene as silence and as harsh as temporary exile to a shed beneath the hot Indian sun. He would leave India for the United States and issue proclamations of impending doom for the civilized world.

But the petulance of youth would survive. Rajneesh -- after a Rolls-Royce he was driving collided with a concrete mix truck, prompting his disciples to revoke his driving privileges -- would sit on his porch in a sulk, his back to the commune that doted on him.

Today, Sidharth is among the 20 or so Rajneesh sannyasins, or disciples, in the guru's boyhood hometown in India. Their number also includes the postmaster and telegraph master.

A grain-marketing town of about 45,000 people, Gadarwara still resembles a village, its narrow streets bustling with oxcart and bicycle traffic. Sidharth said it was a town of only 20,000 when Babulal and Saraswati Bai Babulal Jain moved there with their young son, Mohan Chandra Rajneesh, some 50 years ago.

Their small home still stands -- a sort of shrine to the guru gone West -- in a row of storefront houses in a fringe commercial area. The sparsely decorated front room, open to the narrow street, houses the Shri Devtirth Rajneesh Meditation Centre. Pictures of the guru adorn its walls and a sign in the rear bears the ubiquitous twin doves, the international symbol of Rajneeshee organizations.

In that backwater setting, Rajneesh began honing the oratorical style that would be his ticket to fame as a guru in a land where gurus were as common as cattle -- and not always as sacred.

His garrulous manner of speaking -- a subject of some controversy in India -- was temporarily out of service when Rajneesh came to the United States in 1981. By then, he had taken the vow of silence that his followers hailed as his "ultimate" stage. Rajneesh testified in an August 1984 deposition filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court that he was "finished with doing."

"A man has a birthright to be tired and retired. I am retired completely," he said.

But only two months later, he aborted his "ultimate" stage and ended his public silence -- yet another in his long list of contradictions. Rajneesh has never been uncomfortable with contradictions, or at least those of his own making.

"I am going to be contradictory to myself many times for the simple reason that I am trying to bring all the religions to a higher synthesis," Rajneesh said in "I am That." "Different approaches have to be joined together. I am creating an orchestra."

The would-be maestro's childhood set the stage for such pretensions. Rajneesh was born -- at least most recently -- Dec. 11, 1931, about 40 miles from Gadarwara at his maternal grandparents' home in Kuchwada.

Sannyasin folklore holds that the guru made a previous appearance some 700 years ago. In that incarnation, the disciples believe, Rajneesh was a mystic who was killed just three days short of ending a 21-day fast that was to have culminated in enlightenment. Rajneesh himself has described his present life as a continuation of that one. This time around, he claims to have reached enlightenment at the age of 21.

Sidharth said the family moved to Gadarwara when the boy was 2. At the time, Rajneesh's father, known as Dadda, joined in Sidharth's cloth business. But in "The Awakened One," sannyasin biographer Vasant Joshi of Satya Vedant, wrote that Rajneesh lived with his grandparents in Kuchwada until the age of 7, when his grandfather died.

Rajneesh's own description suggested that his grandparents' home provided ample research material for an aspiring guru.

"My house was a guest house of many Jaina saints, Hindu monks, Sufi mystics, because my grandfather was interested in all of these people," Rajneesh said in "The Rajneesh Bible." "But he was not a follower of anybody; he rather enjoyed me bothering these saints."

Relatives and acquaintances described the young Rajneesh as a willful child who was glib beyond his years. He attended Gunj Primary School and Municipal High School in Gadarwara. He learned English at an early age and spent hours in the public library.

"He was a very good orator from the beginning," recalled S.R. Parate, the Gadarwara postmaster and a school chum of Rajneesh who took the sannyasin name Rambharti in 1977. Although bookish, Rajneesh also could be adventuresome, mischievous and manipulative. Sidharth remembered Rajneesh as a ringleader in a gang of boys with mischief on their minds. He also said his nephew, the oldest of 10 children, loved to swim and play in the Shakkar River at the edge of town.

Rajneesh later told sannyasins how he sought thrills and stretched his mental limits in late-night hikes along a cliff's edge high above the river, where one false step might have brought a fatal fall. The risk, the physical challenge, the concentration and the awareness of death produced a mental state akin to meditation, he said. He tested his friends as he would test his followers, cajoling even the most fearful into attempting risky climbs.

Meditation became an obsession for young Rajneesh, who explored a broad range of techniques in search of what his uncle described as "the supreme power." His father and uncle had hoped Rajneesh would join them in the family business, but Rajneesh had other ideas.

"He had no interest in our business," Sidharth said. Instead, Rajneesh moved to Jabalpur, about 130 miles east of Gadarwara in the heart of India. Jabalpur is home to 535,000 people, several major military installations and a variety of munitions factories. Military officers live in the stately homes that were built during British rule t house foreign VIPs. But it was the University of Jabalpur, the umbrella institution for 32 colleges in the region, that attracted Rajneesh.

His family approved of the move and paid for his education, Sidharth said. Jabalpur became a springboard for Rajneesh's debut as a public speaker. It also provided the setting for his "enlightenment."

While a student, Rajneesh supposedly immersed himself in his spiritual quest. The Joshi biography describes a young man so disturbed by spiritual questions that he feared for his own sanity. By Rajneesh's own account, he suffered severe headaches and had to force himself to eat. In the book, "Tao: The Pathless Path," he said he also began running five to eight miles twice a day.

Rajneesh claims that this enlightenment -- an experience his described as "the explosion" -- occurred March 21, 1953. The event seemed to borrow from the enlightenment of Buddha, born Prince Gautama in 560 B.C., reportedly wandered for years on his spiritual quest before attaining illumination -- and the titles "the Awakened One" and "the Enlightened One" -- while seated beneath a bo tree in Gaya, in northeastern India.

Rajneesh's mulsari tree still stands, anchoring a moat-ringed island in Bhanvartal Garden, a block-sized park in Jabalpur. No sign marks the site of the "explosion," although park caretaker Gaya Prasad known the tale well. He recalled Rajneesh's regular visits -- morning, evening and occasionally overnight -- to sit quietly beneath the tree.

Rajneesh was equally quiet about his newly acquired spiritual status, which he refrained from discussions publicly until some 20 years later in Bombay. The guru has explained his modesty in practical terms, noting that enlightenment has made past masters easy targets for violence.

"I declared it only when I knew that I could create my own small world and I was no more concerned with the crowds and the masses and the stupid mob," the Joshi account quoted him as saying.

Enlightened or not, Rajneesh stayed in school. Hanuman Verma, first a teacher and then a colleague of Rajneesh, recalled the nascent guru as an above-average, but not brilliant, student in English classes during 1954 and 1955. Rajneesh also studied philosophy, logic and political science, and took a part-time job as a copy editor on Nav Bharat, a Hindi daily newspaper, Verma said.

Rajneesh was graduated from the University of Jabalpur in 1955, and with a recommendation letter from Verma, entered the University of Saugur for postgraduate work. Verma recalled Rajneesh's appointment in 1959 as a lecturer at the Mahakoshal Arts College, part of the University of Jabalpur, but said that the guru never became a full professor.

Rammoo Shrivastava, a newspaperman who had met Rajneesh in Jabalpur, said the guru was an impressive speaker but he practiced hypnosis -- a common orator's tool in India -- and was not considered a spiritual authority in Jabalpur.

"What Rajneesh teaches in yoga an din meditation is Kindergarten One class," he said. However, Shrivastava said Rajneesh became the darling of the relatively well-to-do Jaina community. Rajneesh's parents were adherents of the Jaina religion, a sect with strict rules about asceticism. Shrivastava linked Rajneesh's popularity to his teachings that rejected taboos and absolved guilt.

"He knew what the rich people want," Shrivastava said. "They want to justify their guilty consciences, to justify their guilty acts."

Rajneesh also gained a Romeo's reputation in Jabalpur. "That's why his character was suspect -- his activities, his movements among the girls," Shrivastava said.

But Rajneesh's other activities seemed calculated to advance his career as a lecturer. He took breaks and university leave to go on tour, building his reputation outside Jabalpur. Friends and family members said he traveled by rail or by car, often with supplies of written materials to distribute.

A woman identified only as Kranti, reportedly his widowed cousin, trailed him like a shadow in those days, friends recalled. Rajneesh traveled frequently to the big city -- Bombay, a seaport of nearly 7 million people that lay 560 miles southwest of Jabalpur.

Along the way, he recruited several Jaina businessmen to support his fledgling movement. They formed Jeevan Jagruti Kendra, the forerunner of the Rajneesh Foundation, in 1965 to finance the guru's activities, freeing him from the need to collect academic paychecks. Rajneesh selected the trust's name, which translates as "Life Awakening Center."

One of his early supporters in Bombay was Ishverlal N. Shah, who first heard the guru speak in 1963 and took the sannyasin name Ishver Samarpan in 1967. Rajneesh stayed with the Shah family on several occasions and eventually asked Samarpan to work in the movement.

Today, Samarpan runs the Aum Rajneesh Meditation Centre, as well as his own exporting and construction businesses, from offices on an alleylike street off a bustling Bombay market. Over the years, Samarpan bore witness to Rajneesh's driven pace. He recalled the guru's lecturing as many as five times a day and then talking with students late into the night.

"He would go to bed at one in the morning. He told my wife, 'If anyone comes to inquire, please get me up,'" Samarpan said. Samarpan and others bought billboard space and newspaper ads to promote the guru.

Rajneesh began speaking at meditation camps across the Indian countryside in 1964 and resigned from the university in 1966 to concentrate on his lecturing. Although he liked playing to crowded lecture halls and parks, he didn't forgo smaller audiences. Friends said he addressed any local Rotary Club or other group that would have him.

Rajneesh relished controversy, which brought larger crowds to hear him and attracted Indian news media attention. Himmatlal H. Joshi, an early follower who is not related to Rajneesh's biographer, Vasant Joshi, said Rajneesh kept track of newspaper and magazine coverage -- just as his press office does in Oregon today -- and noted the play given a story or picture.

"He knew how to pose for photographers," said Ayub Sayed, editor of an Indian tabloid, Current.

Rajneesh targeted local religions in his lectures on the road, a device guaranteed to cause talk. Usually he stopped short of offending his audiences. But many listeners, impressed with Rajneesh's warnings against following gurus, promptly took up his cause.

Rajneesh didn't speak of forming his own religion at the time. On the contrary, said one early disciple, he taught that everyone was his or her own religion.

Rajneesh even criticized the revered Mahatma Gandhi for trying to synthesize religious thought and for adhering to tradition. His diatribes against organized religion and respected figures such as Gandhi and Mother Teresa of Calcutta startled his listeners.

Joshi said Rajneesh fueled the fire in Bombay in 1968 when he began a series of lectures on love with the declaration that sex was divine.

"The primal energy of sex has the reflection of God in it," he said in the book "From Sex to Superconsciousness." "It is obvious: it is the energy that creates new life. And that is the greatest most mysterious force of all."

The Joshi biography said controversy over the opening sex lecture caused cancellation of the rest of the series. Returning a month later, however, Rajneesh lectured on the same subject to 15,000 people. Lectures on sex -- as a meditative first step on the path to superconsciousness, or enlightenment -- later proved to be a big draw for Westerners.

"Rajneesh gives you the opportunity to sin like you've never sinned before. Only he doesn't call it sin," ex-sannyasin John Ephland wrote in an article for the Spiritual Counterfeits Project of Berkeley, Calif. "The path to desireless is desire."

But many of Rajneesh's Indian disciples, such as Dhanpati T. Hirji, also known as Anand Bodhidharma, preferred to explain their interest in sociological terms. They agreed with Rajneesh's premise that traditional religions did not address their country's massive problems. Bodhidharma, who traveled with Rajneesh from 1968 to 1974, cited the shortcomings of Hinduism to explain.

"If you bend down seven times, you can go to heaven," he said. "It was too cheap." But a Rajneesh lecture struck a more responsive chord.

"I was so stupefied, I could not believe," Bodhidharma said. "Then I actually fell in love with the man. He has brains. He was talking of earthly things, where I was standing."

Bodhidharma's sister, Bombay-born Laxmi Thakarsi Kuruwa, 52, who later took the sannyasin name Yoga Laxmi, also met the guru in 1968. She went on to become Rajneesh's personal secretary until she was displaced in 1981 by a younger and far more combative Indian woman, Sheela Ambalal Patel, 35, born in Baroda and now known as Anand Sheela.

Bodhidharma and his sister were captivated by one of the guru's central themes -- the idea that both Western technology and Eastern spirituality were good, but not by themselves. Rajneesh taught that a blend of both was needed to take man to a higher synthesis, and that his followers would make that spiritual transition.

"he wanted to shake off the rust, shake off the dust, the dust of thousands of centuries," Bodhidharma said. Bodhidharma introduced Rajneesh to the cocktail circuit. The Bombay businessman sponsored cocktail parties where the sage could sip fruit juice and mingle with the guests.

"He was so open at that time," Bodhidharma recalled. Rajneesh also was busy, on the road as much as three weeks a month. The guru shifted his base to Bombay in 1969, although he continued to appear at meditation camps in Mount Abu in northern India.

At one such gathering, Rajneesh sparked the interest of a young British woman, Christine Woolf, now 36 and using the sannyasin name Yoga Vivek. She became the guru's constant companion.

Rajneesh viewed Woolf as the reincarnation of his childhood girlfriend, identified only as Shashi. But his previous companion, cousin Kranti, saw Woolf as the end of a long love affair and left. She later married and settled in Ahmadabad.

"Kranti told me that she could not tolerate any other female near Rajneesh, any young female," said Himmatlal Joshi, who helped run Jeevan Jagruti Kendra.

Such an attitude was destined to bring about a split, for both Indian and Western sources said Rajneesh had an eye for the ladies. Former sannyasins said that during the Bombay years, the guru favored some women disciples with private darshans, or audiences, intended to help them along the path to enlightenment.

Some women regarded sex with the guru as "the ultimate darshan," said one man, now an ex-sannyasin. He admitted having qualms about the situation at first.

"But otherwise I thought, why not? The girls enjoyed it and he enjoyed it, and why not?" he said. "There's no law that says the guru doesn't sleep with his disciples. It's always happened."

Ashram officials urged the women to remain silent. And even though the special sessions finally ended, Rajneesh's predilection for the opposite sex pervaded his philosophy. At times he talked of women in terms that might be applied to a family's beloved dog.

He described them as infinitely patient beings who operated not from the head, but from the heart. His lectures ruled out the possibility that women could be logical, scientific or doubting.

"Because of the womb being a central phenomenon in the feminine body, the whole psychology of woman differs: she is non-aggressive, non-inquiring, non-questioning, non-doubting, because all of those things are part of aggression," he said. "She will not take the initiative, she simply waits -- and she can wait infinitely."

Rajneesh's movement hummed along on wheels well oiled by his faithful women, with Laxmi handling the business and Vivek seeing to his personal needs. But sannyasins never doubted who was really in charge.

In Bombay, Rajneesh took the title bhagwan in 1971, although he never changed his name legally. He also catered increasingly to Westerners. He initiated disciples who followed his rules -- they took new Indian names, wore alas and dyed their clothes ocher, a favorite color of Laxmi's.

Rajneesh met daily with followers from 1970 to 1974. Laxmi kept track of his day-to-day decisions and even briefed him on the backgrounds of some sannyasins before their audiences. Former sannyasins said a background of wealth assured more "juice," or attention from the master.

Declaring Westerners to be generally poorly prepared for the quiet of Eastern meditation, Rajneesh kept busy devising methods he thought would expand their spiritual horizons.

"He would push people to their limits, limits which he himself can handle," said Hugh Milne, 37, a London osteopath who was Rajneesh's chief bodyguard in Poona. "But it's not done with consideration or compassion."

Milne, whose sannyasin name was Shiva-murti, said he and his girlfriend were sent to a hill village outside Bombay, where they were to remain without touching, talking, reading or writing for 21 days.

The only accommodation available was a small shed, Milne said. Its tin roof was an excellent heat conductor during the day, making the cramped quarters seem like an oven. Milne said he couldn't stand it and left after eight days. Milne, a disciple for 10 years, left the movement in November 1982.

"Bhagwan tells you to take any risk, and just risk as much as you can," said another former disciple, Ulrich Muller, 34, who used the sannyasin name Devam Kranti and who was interviewed in Stuttgart, West Germany. "If you break down, you will have learned something. You are closer to enlightenment."Rajneesh established his first real commune when he left his Bombay apartment and moved to Poona, 75 miles southeast of Bombay. Jeevan Jagruti Kendra found the private, 4-acre enclave in Koregaon Park that would become Shree Rajneesh Ashram.

The movement became more theatrical in Poona, where Rajneesh played to an increasingly Western audience. When Rajneesh stopped directing meditations, and empty chair represented him during some sessions. The guru made movie star entrances to his daily lectures, relying on a chauffeured limousine to take him approximately 150 yards from his home in Lao Tzu House to Buddha Hall, where the lectures were held.

Dr. H.V. Sardesai, a Poona internist who attended the guru, said he asked Rajneesh about that habit during an examination. He said Rajneesh responded, "I want people to talk about me."

Rajneesh remained an active master of the daily darshans. He counseled followers about their personal lives, and they took his advice quite personally, describing him as father, lover and adviser. Over and over, he told departing sannyasins to come back to the ashram to visit or stay.

The faithful took his advice to heart. Many dissolved their assets at home and moved to India.

Rambling lectures

Former sannyasins said Rajneesh's lectures sometimes rambled for hours, punctuated by questions from disciples. Michael Barnett, 55, a former disciple and Poona therapy group leader who used the sannyasin name Anand Somendra, noted that "Swami Rajneesh" didn't always address questions.

"You ask him about love and he'll give a long talk about ecstasy. You ask him about relationships and he would ... tell you a joke or something that he just read in a newspaper," Barnett said in a lecture at The Wild Goose company, his therapy center in Zurich, Switzerland.

"It was just like a way of breaking a discourse up, you see. He would intersperse the morning discourse with three or four questions. That would give him a chance to pause and take his breath, and he would read a question.

"It would make you feel as if you were participating," Barnett said. "In fact, nobody ever participated in Poona. There was only one person, really, in Poona."

Aside from lectures and darshans, Rajneesh remained cloistered with a group of favored disciples in Lao Tzu House, a secluded building at the back of the Koreagaon Park compound. He rarely left the ashram. Yet Rajneesh remained the movement's mastermind.

"He knew as much as any head in an international corporation can know of everything that's going on," recalled Milne, who as chief bodyguard was a member of Rajneesh's inner circle.

Former disciples said Rajneesh sent some disciples off to create or run satellite centers around the world and instructed others to conduct therapy groups. He chose the ashram's department heads and occasionally pitted them against one another.

Although he delegated office duties to Laxmi, he was known to countermand her decisions. Ex-sannyasins said they sometimes appealed her rulings on the sly, approaching Rajneesh directly or going through Vivek.

"There was a hierarchy, but no one was protected," one former disciple said of the Poona period. "The truth could get to him, and he was always the final word. He would contradict Laxmi, Sheela ..."

Cadre of protectors

Rajneesh himself was well protected. A cadre of about 50 sannyasins -- trained in karate and other martial arts and working under Milne's leadership -- was the front line of defense for the master. Milne said he ordered periodic practice attacks on Lao Tzu House to test security.

But while the ashram grew, Rajneesh's health became increasingly fragile and his lifestyle became increasingly sedentary, disciples said. His ailments included diabetes, back problems and persistent allergies.

Although Rajneesh had built a reputation for garrulity, he did dabble in periods of silence before swearing off public speaking in 1981. Sheela noted in an affidavit that sannyasins said in silence rather than hearing discourses for 10 days in 1977. Other accounts cited a 10-day silence in 1979, when the guru and his followers enjoyed a music meditation.

Rajneesh stopped reading in 1980, he told U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials. His fabled 150,000-book library was given to Rajneesh International University in Poona, he said.

Neither illness nor silence diminished his yearning for a larger ashram site. Former sannyasins said he pressured first Laxmi and then Sheela to find an area big enough for a "new commune." But neither Rajneesh's zeal nor his ashram's frantic fund raising was able to produce a site in India. Attention quickly shifted to the United States.

In the spring of 1981, disciples became increasingly vocal about Rajneesh's faltering health. The Rajneesh Foundation announced April 11 that the guru had entered his silent phase and would commune with disciples only in silent meditation.

A few ashram residents learned in early may that Sheela planned to take Rajneesh to the United States -- purportedly for back treatment -- but most sannyasins remained in the dark.

The guru and about 15 favored disciples suddenly pulled out of Poona around noon May 31, drove to Bombay and caught a Pan American World Airways flight early on the morning of June 1 to New York City.

Rajneesh stayed for three months in Montclair, N.J., the wealthy bedroom community where Sheela had attended college and established Chidvilas Rajneesh Meditation Center. On April 21, Chidvilas had bought a local landmark -- a Rhine-style castle on a 15-acre estate straddling the Montclair-Verona city line -- and hurriedly renovated it for the guru.

But former sannyasins said Rajneesh was anxious to see his new commune, a vision that Sheela was hastily preparing in Oregon. Rajneesh's health improved so quickly in the United States that on Aug. 29, 1981, he flew to Oregon to visit the former Big Muddy Ranch that Chidvilas had bought in July. Since the beginning, Sheela has described Rajneesh as "a guest" of Chidvilas.

Ex-sannyasins said the guest's arrival on the ranch was a homecoming of sorts -- albeit a hastily prepared one. Robert E. Harvey, 33, a non-sannyasin who was ranch foreman before and after the Rajneeshees bought the Big Muddy, said that in the days before Rajneesh's arrival, some 35 or 40 sannyasins readied an area known as B-site, which would be home to the master. They installed culverts and a road and set up a new triple-wide trailer, working late into the night before his arrival, Harvey said.

"We worked until 10, 11 that night finishing the road so he could drive in there the next day," Harvey recalled. "We never did finish the landscaping (in time). We worked on it for two years around his place."

Landscaping was no small issue, for Rajneesh is fond of greenery. Mary Ann Forbes, 32, of Toronto, a Norfolk, Va.-born American who left the movement last year, said the guru had told sannyasins that he needed only three things to be satisfied -- his disciples, cars to drive and abundant trees.

Ranch disappointing

But most of the 54,229-acre ranch bore little resemblance to the verdant lushness of Rajneesh's Poona compound. Rugged canyonland and juniper-dotted ridges provide a scenic, but arid, backdrop for the ranch headquarters and B-site. Former sannyasins said Rajneesh was disappointed.

"There weren't enough trees. That's why we had to plant all those damn trees at B-site, so he couldn't see the road," Harvey said.

"His reaction when he first stopped at the ranch wasn't a happy one, " recalled one ex-sannyasin. "He kept saying, 'Where are the trees?' He saw this clunky little trailer, he looked quite shocked and he was not in a happy mood for some time."

With or without greenery, the isolated ranch became the court of the realm, and Rajneesh its ruler. He dropped his image as a man of simple needs and assumed the trappings of wealth -- spangled robes, a jewel-encrusted wristwatch and even designer eyeglasses.

The Rajneeshees put their corporate maze to work catering to the guru. Rajneesh Foundation International scheduled festivals to surround him with devoted followers, and the Rajneesh Trust was created in 1982 to meet the guru's personal needs. The trust arranged such details as medical care from the Rajneesh Medical Corp. and protection by the Rajneeshpuram Peace Force.

Disciples expanded the guru's quarters -- designated Lao Tzu Church in court documents -- by adding a medical wing and a $200,000 swimming pool, and they tended his garden. One ex-disciple who left the ranch in 1982 said finances, weather or other circumstances occasionally stalled fulfillment of Rajneesh's demands, but he always had the last word.

"Whether it was a swimming pool or whatever, when he couldn't have it, he'd order another Rolls," she recalled. Soon, his Rolls-Royce garages were overflowing.

Western amenities enjoyed

The guru enjoyed other Western amenities, too. A former sannyasin who worked on the guru's quarters recalled Rajneesh's childlike fascination with a door that was activated by an electric eye. British-born Brian G. Gibb, 37, a Santa Fe, N.M., resident who left the ranch in 1983, said Rajneesh spent about an hour stepping in and out of the electric beam, happily testing his newfangled toy.

"One of the natural feelings that a lot of sannyasins have is that, of course, bhagwan doesn't know what's going on," Milne said. "But that is his major public relations success."

Former disciples said that as surely as he drove his luxury cars, Rajneesh continued to drive the movement. For examples, Harvey said Sheela relayed orders from Rajneesh about some ranch construction projects, including Krishnamurti Dam, which forms a lake on Currant Creek.

Rajneeshee leaders also invoked his name in ordering the closure or consolidation of centers in Europe and Australia. An insurance executive who dealt with the ranch for several years said Sheela regularly referred to conversations with Rajneesh, claiming he made decisions about specific business and ranch development matters. Former sannyasins said Sheela frequently took important decisions "to him."

Films provided the guru's main diversion. Because he had stopped reading, Rajneesh became an avid movie buff. Milne and other former sannyasins said several disciples were dispatched along the West Coast to collect videotapes to satisfy the guru's new hobby -- one that rivaled his past penchant for books. "Patton" and "The Ten Commandments" were said to be his favorites.

Ex-sannyasins said that shortly after he saw a film about Nostradamus, Rajneesh made his most apocalyptic predictions. Although he has repeatedly claimed no knowledge of temporal matters, Rajneesh became convinced that the world was going to hell in a handbasket.

Floods, earthquakes

In 1983, he proclaimed that 1984 would herald 15 years of catastrophes -- floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, nuclear explosions -- leading to a global holocaust.

"Rajneeshism is creating a Noah's Ark of consciousness, remaining centered exactly in the middle of the cyclone," he said in "Rajneeshism: An Introduction to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and His Religion." "You can only escape within, and that's what I teach. I do not teach worship of God or any other ritual but only a scientific way of coming to your innermost core."

Pampered and isolated from the outside world, Rajneesh became more and more convinced of his religious supremacy -- an idea that startled some longtime sannyasins.

Many former disciples recalled a Rajneesh who didn't claim to have created a religion, who counted Methodists and Jainas among his following. In a 1971 lecture, Rajneesh said that all religions could be acceptable, because their common goal was to lead the individual toward "one superconsciousness."

"Therefore, I have neither any religion of my own, nor any path of my own, because no one exclusive path or religion will work for the future," he said. True to form, Rajneesh reversed himself in October 1984, staking a claim for Rajneeshism.

"Ours is the only religion, first religion in the history of the world," he said in a statement published by the Rajneesh Times. "All the others are just premature experiments which have failed. And we are not going to fail. For the simple reason because we don't have any belief that can be proved untrue. We don't have any dogma that can be criticized."